To Land’s End… and beyond!

It’s been so busy here with orders and commissions, and as a result I know I’ve been neglectful of my blogging friends – taking an age to reply to comments and not keeping up with my blog reading.  I wish I could say this slovenly state of affairs will improve but in fact they’ll be taking a nosedive as of tomorrow – because I’m going away for three weeks and will have absolutely no internet access in that time. I can’t deny it, I’m thrilled skinny!

First off R and I will be going to Cornwall, camping near St Just on the Land’s End Peninsula. There are many rare wild flowers and insects to be found in the area as well as some great walking and beaches as good as you’ll find anywhere.

After a couple of days exploring this lovely place we’ll be catching the Scillonian III from Penzance to The Isles of Scilly (pronounced “silly”) where we’ll be camping on the beautiful Island of St Agnes, by far and away my favourite of these enchanted islands. A haunt of rare migratory birds (though we’ll be too early for most of those) and carpeted with wildflowers, St Agnes also has the best snorkelling and rockpooling I’ve ever done in the UK – here’s hoping that the sea will be calm and the water clear! And not least because that ferry journey is never anything less than rough… although it’s worth it for the sightings of dolphins, basking sharks and the heart stopping flight of hunting gannets. You can fly across to the islands, but watching dolphins play on the bow wave of the ship and rare birds gliding alongside it is a lot more fun.

So I’m dragging out the field guides, polishing up the binoculars and getting all nerdy at the thought of all that wildlife. I need to take a notebook too, because there will be a lot to remember. And a lot of shells to collect for jewellery making purposes. Oh, and there will be a lot of cream teas to eat, but that’s another story.

Then it’s back home on the ferry and the sleeper train – arriving in London at 7.00 am – and a day in which to unpack, do laundry and make a fancy dress astronaut costume, repack and then catch another train and another ferry to Bestival on the Isle Of Wight! I have to admit I’m a little bit daunted by that bit, but I’ve never failed to have fun at Bestival so it has got to be worth it.

For the Cornish part of my travels I might be able to Twitter, but as we get further from the mainland on the ferry journey to Scilly the phone signal will start to fade out and I probably won’t have any reception at all once we reach the islands. So it will be a genuine break for me – in a place where technology cannot follow. I can hardly wait.

PS:- It’s possible that if you leave comments after Friday morning they will not show up for a very long time, as I will not have a chance to moderate them. I do love geting comments though, so if you leave some for me anyway it will be a lovely thing for me to come home to.

Hunting the elusive Bee orchid

Whilst doing the seed bomb workshop a couple of weeks ago I discovered a delightful fact – allegedly there are Bee Orchids growing on Tottenham Marshes about a mile and a half from my home, and they are due to start blooming right now. How could I resist such a lure? I’ve been neglecting the marshes lately, so I got on my bike and went to see what I could see.

What I saw, alas, was not Bee Orchids. It hardly mattered though, since I was out and about on the last glorious sunny day of this summer so far, and what I did find was rather wonderful in it’s own right.

Zooming down Coppermill Lane through a dense tunnel of rank vegetation, assaulted by the shrill voices of wrens and the scree of nestlings in every tall shrub I wondered why I don’t do this every day. When I got to the drainage ditches at Springfield marina the air was filled with zipping electric blue sparks of Enallagma Cyathigerum – the Common Blue Damselfly. I sat down beside the water and watched their nuptial dances, and was lucky enough to find these two in their extraordinary lovers embrace. If you view mating damselflies from the right angle their joined bodies make a perfect heart shape. Most bodies of water on a still sunny day will yield views of these lovely creatures right now in the UK, and they are well worth looking for. I also saw a glorious Libellula Depressa – or Broad-bodied Chaser, a male dragonfly with a body the colour of powdered and bottled summer skies. Naturally he teased me by flying from his territorial perch every time I got him into focus but I don’t go on these adventures just for photographic trophies and it’s just as well – I would have been deeply frustrated that day!

After half an hour of happy damselfly and tadpole watching I got back on the bike and rode along the River Lea navigation towpath. Shoals of small fish swarmed in the still water and mute swans fussed over their huge nests, and overhead swallows chattered. I was at Tottenham marshes at last.

It’s not much to look at, perhaps, to some people. A swathe of rank long vegetation sandwiched between a busy road, allotments and a canal and with pylons, gasometers, bus depots and factories looming at it’s edges, it’s not many peoples idea of a wildlife paradise. But it’s truly wild, and this liminal post industrial landscape is where the revolution starts, you mark my words. It’s places like these that are home to undiscovered beauty, the covert reclamation of land by all the other living things besides the human. Of course it’s managed to some extent, but the beauty of places like these is that things slip in under the radar – this kind of land is the sort that will suddenly sprout, unexpectedly, a beautiful flower from seeds or rhizomes that have slept in the earth for years.

The air was thick with the scent of elderflower and pollen tickled my eyes and dusted my feet. The voices of many warblers made one territorial claim after another, each responding to the last in a singing chain, a necklace of song. I wheeled the bike along and searched in vain through the long, tangled vegetation.

Was I sad that I didn’t find any Bee Orchids?  Not at all, not when so many other beautiful things crossed my path. The bee orchids got me out of the house and may have been my stated aim, but their coy refusal to show themselves led me to other secrets every bit as marvellous.

Pay no attention…

…to the woman behind the curtain, she doesn’t know what she’s doing! Like Dorothy here I’ve been wondering lately what direction I’m supposed to be going in. And just as it is with the Wizard himself it’s all getting pretty flaky behind the curtain,  no matter how impressively overblown my last appearence here was. If you’ve never seen or read The Wizard of Oz you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about but that doesn’t matter, all you need to know is that I’m going to have to make some changes to the site. One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet is because I’ve been wrestling behind that stupid curtain trying to find a layout and navigation that suits.

I’m hoping to roll out the changes gradually and with any luck you’ll like them! I’m hoping the site will become more welcoming to people who land here looking for my shop, while at the same time not making the nature blog become too commercial looking. I’ve been agonising over this since ooohhh, forever, and I wish sometimes that I wasn’t so damn fastidious about  the whole thing. By the way, I’m going to start making an effort with replying to your comments again, and I’ve already made a start on the previous post.

So, what can you look forward to on the nature blog? Well, there are still some more tales to come from Wales and the Isle of Skye, and then there’s my more recent visit to the glorious but not-so-sunny Isles of Scilly. As we move on into Autumn and winter I’ll be writing about the changing seasons closer to home. Beyond that, who knows? It’s time to lace up my hiking boots and find a new adventure.

Gon out, Bisy Backson…

…as Christopher Robin would have put it. Gon out to beautiful Snowdonia, where we visited a friend and hiked in the midsummer moonlight, saw rare flowers and rarer skies. Needless to say, there are pictures, and stories, and soon I will be able to share them, but not just yet. This weekend I’ll be exploring summer meadows in Hampshire, and I’m also preparing for an exciting new work commitment which I will no doubt bore you stupid with if it comes about; I’ll keep writing here and reading along with you my friends, but I’m not going to be so productive for a month or so – just to let you know.

I’ve got lots to share…

I’ve just got back from the Isle of Skye, a place of such ridiculous beauty that I’m almost stumped as to what to say about it first. The journey itself was mind blowing – a two day long, three train extravaganza including one of the most dramatic and beautiful train journeys in the world, from Glasgow to Mallaig. Sure we could have taken a sleeper train pretty much the whole way, but I wouldn’t want to sleep through a journey that revealed a red deer standing aloof on a bleak moor, mountain ranges framing him on each side, or a solitary seal basking by the side of a glittering loch. We passed Ben Nevis, tallest of the Scottish mountains and rattled over the viaduct which (in the film at least) carries Harry Potter and friends to Hogwarts in style. Searing yellow gorse competed with the improbable, incandescent greens of springtime; the season seems to be a full month behind London and all the more beautiful for it.

We were there just short of a week, but in that time I gorged myself on beauty. I’m still trying to identify orchids I saw in profusion and the birds that sang in the tree near our tent every evening – these habitats were unfamiliar to me and the flora and fauna excitingly novel. Needless to say I have many pictures to share – once I’ve unpacked, caught up on sleep and pulled myself together generally, you’ll be the first to know.